Life of Charlotte Brontë

Life of Charlotte Brontë
(version 1, Volume 2)

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Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell

Published:

1857

Pages:

267

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1,767

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Life of Charlotte Brontë
(version 1, Volume 2)

By

0
(0 Reviews)
Women ought to be good biographers. They have a talent for personal discourse and familiar narrative, which, when properly controlled, is a great gift, although too frequently it degenerates into a social nuisance. Mrs Gaskell, we regret to say, has, in the present work, so employed her talent that she appears too much in the latter light—as a gossip and a gad-about. There was not much to say of Charlotte Brontë, better known as Currer Bell, but the biographer was determined to say a great deal: she therefore makes a pilgrimage to every spot where her heroine was ever known to have set her foot. -- Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1857

Book Excerpt

tolerably level ground, distant hills on the left, a "beck" flowing through meadows on the right, and furnishing water power, at certain points, to the factories built on its banks. The air is dim and lightless with the smoke from all these habitations and places of business. The soil in the valley (or "bottom," to use the local term) is rich; but, as the road begins to ascend, the vegetation becomes poorer; it does not flourish, it merely exists; and, instead of trees, there are only bushes and shrubs about the dwellings. Stone dykes are everywhere used in place of hedges; and what crops there are, on the patches of arable land, consist of pale, hungry-looking, grey green oats. Right before the traveller on this road rises Haworth village; he can see it for two miles before he arrives, for it is situated on the side of a pretty steep hill, with a back-ground of dun and purple moors, rising and sweeping away yet higher than the church, which is built at the very summit of the long narrow street. All rou

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